Hybrid electric nitro 1/8th scale!

[Overdriven]

Originally Posted by hootie7159

i was just stating that this is a pretty creative project and we all should at least be supporting these types of projects...it's thinking outside of the box...and creating things just to prove that it can be done and because it's FUN! and gets today's youth involved...and if anything, will further support the known fact that brushless is far more efficient and powerful than nitro

I think that sums it up. Could the project have been engineered more like a real hybrid? Yes. But the electronics and engineering for implementing that would've been alot more complex and probably not within the scope of the project.

Quote from the website: "Earlier this year, Pro-Line was approached for a special project by a University of Kansas senior named Will Pro who is studying Mechanical Engineering.

The design project is entitled the KU “EcoHawks,” and it involved the designing, building, and testing of small-scale remote-controlled vehicles. His group designed a 1:8 scale parallel hybrid vehicle.

Pro-Line was commissioned to provide a few sets of tires, wheels and a body for static/kinetic friction coefficient comparisons, as well as drive train efficiency comparisons and wind tunnel comparisons."

So the student was a senior. The project was to create a 1/8 vehicles, and they are testing drivetrain efficiency, static/kinetic friction coefficients, doing windtunnel testing etc. So I doubt the students or the teacher where looking for any groundbreaking designs here. They were simply looking for a working vehicle, a complete analysis of its performance, and presumably a paper on it as well. Clearly not a design competition, just create a test mule and test it. This one got press because someone asked for Prolines help and they thought it was the coolest one to put on their website.

Is it useless to an RC enthusiast who just wants to drive? Most definitely. Is it a cool tool to learn about designing around problems, testing various factors of a vehicles perfromance, while playing with rc for a school project? Most definitely.